(Trans)Cultural Cinema: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Difference

in Non-Fiction Film

Course number

VES 189 (cross-listed with Anthro)

Time and Place Mon 6-8 Carpenter Ctr., B04 (Screening)

Tues 10-11:30, B04 Tues 6-8, B04 (Screening)

Instructor Lucien Taylor

Office Hours:. Tues 11:30 — 12:30 Sever, 405 [accessible only from north stairwell]

and by appointment at your convenience Lucien_Taylor@Harvard.Edu

Teaching Fellow

Noelle Stout stout@fas.harvard.edu

HARVARD UNIVERSITY FALL 2003

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COURSE OUTLINE This course traces the variety of ways in which predominantly non-fiction film- and video-makers from the 1920s to the present have depicted reality, human existence, and culture. As such, it concentrates to a significant degree on filmmakers who have focused on the reciprocal provocations between individual human subjects and the wider cultural circumstances, circuits, and contexts in which their lives are enmeshed. In featuring many imagemakers who are categorized, whether by themselves or others, as ethnographic, indigenous, or diasporic, in orientation or origin, the seminar seeks to bring certain critical insights from film studies, cultural studies, and anthropology into fertile juxtaposition.

We shall address the problems and prospects of different modalities and traditions of filmmaking; the blurring of boundaries between filmic genres and the multiciplicity of relationships they establish between the “pro-filmic” and the filmic; the ethics as well as the epistemology of pictorial and audiovisual representation; and the relationships that are put into play between films’ subjects, their makers, and their spectators, in a wide variety of cultural settings, Western and non-Western, colonial and post-colonial. Ways in which films may “contest” culture, and/or may reveal different aspects of the world from those portrayed by expository, and especially anthropological, writing, as well as phenomenological differences between styles of ethnographic writing and of ethnographic film, will also be considered.

Filmmakers whose works will be screened and analyzed include Robert Flaherty, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Buñuel, Dziga Vertov, Maya Deren, Jean Rouch, Kidlat Tahimik, Robert Gardner, Shanti Thakur, Ross McElwee, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Marilu Mallet, and Zacharias Kunuk. COURSE REQUIREMENTS Attendance at all classes is required, as is close reading of all assigned course material by the class date in question. Because the course bridges multiple academic disciplines, the reading (as well as the viewing) load is high. The class itself is conducted as a seminar, rather than a lecture series. As such, class participation is extremely important, and will constitute 20% of your grade. In addition, there are two kinds of written assigments: (1) A film journal, to which you will contribute analytical reviews throughout the semester. This journal will constitute 40% of your grade. You should write one-two page double-spaced critical reviews for 13 of the films that we see, relating the films to the themes and the reading of the course as a whole, and especially to the reading of that week. Rather than attempting some monstrosity such as summarising a film in toto, you should hone in on a particular moment in, or aspect of, a film: a cut, a shot, a sequence, a character, a line of dialogue, a title, the cinematography, the editing, etc. The “closer” and more descriptive your review, the better. You are encouraged to quote from the

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reading, not by way of summary or to indicate your assent to an author’s point of view, but rather whenever you take exception to and wish to argue against a proposition being established, or a line of argument being elaborated. By way of preparation for these analytical reviews, it is crucial that you take detailed notes as you watch the films, and that you write the reviews as soon as possible after seeing the films (and having completed the accompanying reading), as films rarely stay fresh in the mind. Whenever possible, films screened in class have also been purchased for the HFA Film Study Library on VHS, and so are available for detailed re-viewing, with Pause, Rewind, and fast Forward Buttons, in your own time.

The film reviews are due weekly. Graduate students should hand the review — about one, some, or even (God forbid) all of the previous week’s films — to Lucien at the beginning of the Tuesday class each week. Undergraduates should hand in the review to Noelle at the beginning of section each week. Additionally, undergraduates must email reviews, as an attachment, to Noelle, by midnight of the night preceding section. Many thanks, in advance. (No extensions. A full letter grade will be deducted for each late day.)

(2) As a final writing project (also 40% of your grade), you may either (a) write a 12-16 page essay on one of a number of possible subjects that will be handed out during the semester, or (b) compose a well-researched 14+ pp. proposal for a non-fiction film or video that you might wish to produce. You are encouraged to meet with the TF and instructor as early as possible during the semester during office hours to discuss any ideas you may have for this project. If you choose the latter, you should undertake research — archival, and if possible also participant-observation — on your subject during the course of semester, and come to class prepared to talk about your progress and evolving relationships and ideas. If you have your own equipment, you may also, with the instructor’s permission, undertake preliminary shooting or audio recording.

Guidelines for the final project will be handed out during the semester; a one-

paragraph outline of your proposal is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday October 7; the final project itself is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday Dec 16. (No extensions. A full letter grade will be deducted for each late day.) COURSE TEXTS There are 6 required course texts: — Course Reader (CR below) — For Documentary, D. Vaughan (California, 1999) (FD, below) — Visualizing Theory, ed. L. Taylor (Routledge, 1994) (VT below) — Transcultural Cinema, D. MacDougall (Princeton, 1999) (TC below) — Cross-Cultural Filmmaking, I Barbash & L. Taylor (California, 1998) (CCF, below) — Making Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner and Akos Östör (MFB, below)

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COURSE OUTLINE Week I: Introduction: Cultural Authenticity and

Representational Veracity Tues Sept. 16 No Lies (1973) Mitchell Block, 16mm, 16 mins. I’m British But… (1990) Gurinder Chadha, 28 mins Tues Sept 16 Screening “Cannibal Tours” (1987) Dennis O’Rourke, 16mm, 70 mins. Week II: The Indigene & the Alien: Exoticism & Humanism Mon Sept 22 Screening Nanook of the North (1922) Robert Flaherty, 64 mins. Tues Sept. 23 Reading: “Cannibal Tours,” Dean MacCannell (VT) “No Lies: Direct Cinema as Rape,” Vivian Sobchack (CR) “Iconophobia,” Lucien Taylor (CR) “Documentary Styles” (Ch. 1, CCF) “Nanook of the North,” William Rothman (CR) “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography,” Fatimah Tobing Rony (CR) Tues Sept. 23 Screening Nanook Revisited (1990, 54 mins.)

Week III: Holism & Nostalgia: The Exotic At Home Mon Sept. 29 Screening Man of Aran (1934) Robert Flaherty, 77 mins.

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Tues Sept. 30 Reading: “Culture, Difference, Identity,” Adam Kuper (CR) “Writing against Culture,” Lila Abu-Lughod (CR) “Filming Real People,” Robert Flaherty (CR) “Man of Aran,” Richard Barsam (CR) “Visual Anthropology & the Ways of Knowing,” David MacDougall (TC) “Rooting for Magoo,” Dai Vaughan (FD) “How the Myth Was Made,” Gordon Hitchens (CR) “Introduction” (CCF) “From Fieldwork to Filming” (Ch. 2, CCF) Tues Sept. 30 Screening How the Myth Was Made (1978) George Stoney, 59 mins. Week IV: Montage & Modernity; Surrealism & Urbanity Mon Oct 6 Screening The Man with the Movie Camera (1928) Dziga Vertov, 68-90 mins. Rien que les heures [Only the Hours] (1926) Alberto Cavalcanti, 40 mins. Tues Oct 7 Reading: “Dziga Vertov: The Man with the Movie Camera,” CR) “The Man with the Movie Camera,” Dai Vaughan (CR) “Manufacturing Vision,” David Tomas (VT) “Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds,” Michael Taussig (VT) “Alberto Cavalcanti,” Emir Rodriguez Monegal (CR) “Two Aspects of the City: Cavalcanti & Ruttman,” Jay Chapman (CR) “Rien que les heures.” Ian Aitken (CR) “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film,” Jeff Ruoff (CR) “Synthetic Vision,” Vivian Sobchack (CR) “Land without Bread,” William Rothman (CR) “Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon,” Marie Seton (CR) “Song of Ceylon: An Interview with Basil Wright,” Cecil Straa (CR) “The Art of National Projection,” William Guynn (CR) “First Principles of Documentary,” John Grierson (CR) “Night Mail,” Dai Vaughan (CR) “’It was an atrocious film,’” Jeanette Sloniowski (CR)

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Due: One-Para Outline of Final Film/Video Proposals Tues Oct 7 Screening Las Hurdes/ Tiera Sin Pan Luis Buñuel, 1932, 22 mins Song of Ceylon (1934) Basil Wright, 40 mins. Night Mail (1936) Basil Wright and Harry Watt, 24 mins. Le sang des bêtes (1949) Georges Franju, 22 mins. Week V: Trance & Transcendence Mon Oct 13 Columbus Day (Holiday) Tues Oct 14 Las Hurdes/ Tiera Sin Pan Luis Buñuel, 1932, 22 mins [alternative version] Reading: “Voodoo Vérité,” Ruby Rich (CR) “Author’s Preface,” & “Introductory Note,” Maya Deren (CR) “Maya Deren’s Ethnographic Representation of Ritual and Myth in Haiti,” Moira Sullivan (CR) “An Introduction to the Notebook of Maya Deren, 1947,” Catrina Neiman (CR) Tues Oct 14 Screening Divine Horsemen Maya Deren, 1947-1951 (1977), 60 mins. Week VI: Ethno-Fiction, Cinéma-Vérité, & I-witnessing Mon Oct 20 Screening Les Maîtres fous Jean Rouch, 1953-4, 33 mins. Chronique d’un été [Chronicle of a Summer] (1961) Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 90 mins.

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Tues Oct 21 Reading: “The ‘Dialogic Imagination’ of Jean Rouch,” Diane Scheinman (CR) “Les Maîtres Fous,” Paul Stoller (CR) “A Conversation with Jean Rouch,” Lucien Taylor (CR) “Artaud, Rouch, and the Cinema of Cruelty,” Paul Stoller (VT) “Chronicle of a Film,” Edgar Morin (CR) “The Cinema of the Future?,” Jean Rouch (CR) “The Point of View of the ‘Characters’” (CR) “Chronicle of a Summer,” William Rothman (CR) “Documentary Film & the discourse of Hysterical/ Historical Narrative,” Lucy Fischer (CR) Tues Oct 21 Screening Sherman’s March (1985) Ross McElwee * Thurs Oct 23 * Screening: Bright Leaves (2003) Ross McElwee, 107 mins. (Carpenter Center Main Lecture Hall) 7 p.m. Filmmaker in person. Be sure to arrive early! Week VII: (Beyond) Observational Cinema Mon Oct 27 Screening Titicut Follies (1967) Frederik Wiseman & John Marshall, 89 mins. The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971) Stan Brakhage Tues Oct 28 Reading: “Ethnography in the First Person,” Barry Grant (CR) “The Aesthetics of Ambiguity,” Dai Vaughan (FD) “Beyond Observational Cinema,” David MacDougall (TC) “Seeing with Experimental Eyes,” Bart Testa (CR) “Introduction,” L. Taylor (TC) “Reframing Ethnographic Film,” Barbash & Taylor (CR) “Unprivileged Camera Style,” David MacDougall (TC) “What do we mean by ‘What’?,” Dai Vaughan (FD) “Notes on the Ascent of a Fictitious Mountain,” Dai Vaughan (FD)

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“Complex Constructions with Subjective Voices,” Peter Loizos (pp. 91-100) (CR) Tues Oct 28 Screening To Live with Herds (1968/1972) David MacDougall, 70 mins. Week VIII: Gender & Auteur Mon Nov 3 Screening Rivers of Sand (1975) Robert Gardner, 84 mins. Tues Nov 4 Reading: “Out of Words: The Aesthesodic Cine-Eye of Robert Gardner,” I. Barbash (CR) “Rivers of Sand,” Robert Gardner (CR) “The feather and the grindstone,” Octavio Paz (CR) “Filming among the Hamar,” Ivo Strecker (CR) “Rivers of Sand,” Lionel Bender (CR) “A Critique of Lionel Bender’s Review of Rivers of Sand” (CR) “Reply to Lydall and Strecker on Rivers of Sand,” Lionel Bender (CR) Rivers of Sand, script (CR) “Filming The Women who Smile,” Jean Lydall (CR) Tues Nov 4 Screening The Women Who Smile (1990) Joanna Head and Jean Lydall, 50 mins. Duka’s Dilemma (2002) Jean Lydall, 87 mins. Week IX: Televisual (Re)membering Mon Nov 10 Screening Memories and Dreams (1992) Melissa Llewelyn-Davies, 92 mins. Reading: “Conversations with Anthropological Filmmakers: Melissa Llewelyn-Davies,” Anna Grimshaw (CR) “Films of Memory,” David MacDougall (TC) “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?, Lila Abu- Lughod” (CR)

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Tues Nov 11 Veterans’ Day (Holiday) Week X: Memory and Modernism Mon Nov 17 Screening Perfumed Nightmare Kidlat Tahimik, 1978, 91 mins. Tues Nov 18 Reading: “’Art Naif’ and the Admixture of Worlds,” Fredric Jameson (CR) “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage,” George Marcus (VT) “Future Travel,” Christopher Pinney (VT) “Marker Changes Trains,” Terrence Rafferty (CR) “A Deconstructive Documentary,” Allan Casebier (CR) Tues Nov 18 Screening Sans Soleil (1982) Chris Marker, 100 mins. Week XI: Beyond Words… Beyond Anthropology? Mon Nov 24 Screening Forest of Bliss (1985) Robert Gardner, 91 mins. Tues Nov 25 Reading: “Distance as Distance: Film as Film,” Harry Tomicek (CR) “Some Thoughts About Making Forest of Bliss,” Robert Gardner (CR) “Forest of Bliss,” Stanley Cavell (CR) “The Limitations of Imagist Documentary,” Alexander Moore (CR) Letter to the Editor, Robert Gardner (CR) “Comment on Robert Gardner’s ‘Forest of Bliss,’” Jonathon Parry (CR) “Robert Gardner’s ‘Forest of Bliss’ — A Review,” Radikha Chopra (CR) “Is that what ‘Forest of Bliss’ is all about?,” Akos Oster (CR) “The Emperor and His Clothes,” Jay Ruby (CR) “Assassins and Cainnibals,” Edmund Carpenter (CR) Letter from Gerardo Reichel Dolmatoff (CR) “Anthropologists Against Death,” Frits Stall (CR)

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“Powers of Horror,” Kamala Visweswaran (CR) “Forest of Bliss: Film & Anthropology,” Akos Östör (CR) Making Forest of Bliss, Robert Gardner and Akos Östör (MFB) Tues Nov 25 Screening Forest of Bliss (1985) Robert Gardner, 91 mins. Seven Hours to Burn (1999) Shanti Thakur, 9 mins. Week XII: The Post-modern & the Post-colonial: The “Indigenous” as Avant-Garde Mon Dec 1 Screening Reassemblage (1982) Trinh T. Minh-ha, 40 mins. Nice Colored Girls Tracey Moffatt, 1987, 16 mins. Night Cries Tracey Moffatt, 1990, 19 mins. Tues Dec 2 Reading: “Reassemblage,” Trinh T. Minh-ha (CR) “Trinh… Observed: Anthropology & Others,” Henrietta Moore (VT) “Speaking Nearby,” Nancy N. Chen & Trinh T. Minh-ha (VT) “Only Angels Have Wings,” Isaac Julien with Mark Nash (CR) “Night Cries: Another Colonial Horror Story,” Catherine Russell (CR) “Nice Colored Girls,” Peter Loizos (CR) “Victor Masayesva Jr.,” Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (CR) “Indigenous Media,” Faye Ginsburg (CR) “Televisualist Anthropology,” James Weiner, & Comment (CR) “Marketing Alterity,” Rachel Moore (VT) “Videomaking with Brazilian Indians,” Patricia Aufderheide (CR)

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Tues Dec 2 Screening Imagining Indians (1992) Victor Masayesva, 60 mins. Video Cannibalism (199X?) Vincent Carelli, 17 mins. Jungle Secrets (1998) Taitetua village, 37 mins. We Gather as a Family (1993) Vincent Carelli, 32 mins. Week XIII: Exile and Nation: A Fatal Couplet? Mon Dec 8 Screening Journal Inachevé [Unfinished Diary] (1983) Marilu Mallet, 55 mins. Tues Dec 9 Reading: “The Ethnographer’s Tale,” Bill Nichols (VT) “The Politics of the Personal,” Zuzana Pick (CR) “New Subjectivities,” Michael Renov (CR) “Black Independents and Third Cinema,” Reece Auguiste (CR) “Frantz Fanon As Film,” Isaac Julien and Mark Nash (CR) Tues Dec 9 Screening Twilight City (Reece Auguiste, 1989) Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Isaac Julien, 1996, 50 mins.) Week XIV: Global Digital Indigenous Mythmaking Mon Dec 15 Screening Selected Igloolik Isuma productions Tues Dec 16: Reading: “From Today, Cinema is Dead,” Dai Vaughan (FD) “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media,” Faye Ginsburg (CR) “Our Company,” from Igloolik Video web site (CR) “The Public Art of Inuit Storytelling,” (CR) Due: Final Project (at beginning of class)

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Tues Dec 16 Screening Atanarjuat/ The Fast Runner (2002) Zacharias Kunuk Wed Dec 17: Winter Recess

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